Developing Slow Start over Wireless Networks

In wired networks, congestion is the main reason for most of the packet losses and the original TCP is the best option to implement. However, in wireless networks, these losses will arise for reasons other than congestion. TCPW has been proved to work better in performance and bandwidth utilization than Reno and New Reno in wireless networks. Our research mainly focuses on the slow-start phase of TCPW and develops an algorithm to divide the phase into two parts. In this paper, we propose a simple refinement of slow-start algorithm of TCP Westwood (TCPW), which is a TCP variant focused on to achieve higher performance in wireless and wired networks. We show by results that the new theme could reduce possibility of packet loss in wireless networks. In the first half of slow-start, we use the exponential increase just like the original slow-start. Moreover, we grow the congestion window gradually to decrease packet burstiness in the second half of slow-start.